April 2018
April 19, 2018
I submitted a PWA to 3 app stores. Here’s what I learned (via) Useful real-world experience shipping a progressive web app to the iOS, Android and Windows app stores.
April 20, 2018
Datasette plugins, and building a clustered map visualization
Datasette now supports plugins!
[... 751 words]Datasette ClusterMap Plugin – Querying UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) Food Hygiene Ratings Open Data (via) Tony Hirst wrote a tutorial on using datasette-cluster-map to analyze food hygiene ratings data from the FSA
April 23, 2018
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.
Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on Wikipedia (via) Wikipedia now shows a little preview card on internal links with an image and summary paragraph of the linked page. As a Wikpedia user I absolutely love this feature—and as an engineer and product designer, it’s fascinating to hear the challenges they overcame to ship it. Of particular interest: actually generating a useful summary of a page, while stripping out the cruft that often accumulates at the beginning of their text. It’s also an impressive scaling challenge: the API they use for this feature is now handling more than 500,000 requests per minute.
react-jsonschema-form. Exciting library from the Mozilla Services team: given a JSON Schema definition, react-jsonschema-form can produce a cleanly designed React-powered form for adding and editing data that matches that schema. Includes support for adding multiple items in a nested array, re-ordering them, custom form widgets and more.
April 24, 2018
csvs-to-sqlite 0.8. I released a new version of my csvs-to-sqlite tool this morning with a bunch of handy new features. It can now rename columns and define their types, add the CSV filenames as an additional column, add create indexes on columns and parse dates and datetimes into SQLite-friendly ISO formatted values.
dateparser: python parser for human readable dates (via) I’ve used dateutil.parser for this in the past, but dateparser is a major upgrade: it knows how to parse dates in 200 different language locales, can interpret different timezone representations and handles relative dates (“3 months, 1 week and 1 day ago”) as well.
The current linkedin.com homepage clocks in at 1.9MB of CSS (156KB compressed). After re-building a fully-functional version of the homepage with CSS Blocks, we were able to serve the same page with just 38KB of CSS. To be clear: that's the uncompressed size. After compression, that CSS file weighed in at less than 9KB!
April 25, 2018
JSON Escape Text. I built a tiny tool for turning text into an escaped JSON string—I needed it to help create descriptions and canned SQL queries for adding to Datasette’s metadata.json files.
Black Onlline Demo (via) Black is “the uncompromising Python code formatter” by Łukasz Langa—it reformats Python code to a very carefully thought out styleguide, and provides almost no options for how code should be formatted. It’s reminiscent of gofmt. José Padilla built a handy online tool for trying it out in your browser.
China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet
System-Versioned Tables in MariaDB (via) Fascinating new feature from the SQL:2011 standard that’s getting its first working implementation in MariaDB 10.3.4. “ALTER TABLE products ADD SYSTEM VERSIONING;” causes the database to store every change made to that table—then you can run “SELECT * FROM products FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP @t1;” to query the data as of a specific point in time. I’ve tried all manner of horrible mechanisms for achieving this in the past, having it baked into the database itself would be fantastic.
Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette
Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.
[... 1,167 words]April 26, 2018
Scaling a High-traffic Rate Limiting Stack With Redis Cluster. Brandur Leach describes the simple, elegant and performant design of Redis Cluster, and talks about how Stripe used it to scaled their rate-limiting from one to ten nodes.
April 28, 2018
Make Near Me (via) The natural evolution of owlsnearme.com—Make Near Me uses the Zeit Now API to allow anyone to deploy their own version of Owls Near Me for any species! I announced this on stage at Zeit Day SF 2018 as part of my talk on Datasette and Datasette Publish.
Datasette—a talk at Zeit Day SF 2018 (via) Slides from the talk I gave today about Datasette and Datasette Publish at the Zeit Day SF conference.